In the climate of environmentally friendly products, fabric conditioning formulations which are concentrated are more desirable. Liquid compositions are dispersions of lamellar droplets of fabric softening actives. When the concentration of such actives such as DHTDMAC goes above 10% per active base, the resulting products become highly viscous, unpourable and unstable due primarily to the flocculation of the lamellar droplets.
The prior art has addressed these problems, in part, by using decoupling polymers. Decoupling polymers are polymers formed from hydrophilic backbones with covalently bonded pendant hydrophobic side groups. These types of polymers are difficult and expensive to manufacture.
The covalently bound polymers are believed to deflocculate lamellar droplets because the hydrophobic roots of the polymers incorporate into an outer bilayer of the lamellar droplets. Thus, the polymers dangle from the droplet surface into a continuous aqueous phase of the fabric conditioning formulation to reduce the attractive interaction forces between droplets and prevent the droplets from flocculating. Product stability thus results from the decrease in flocculation and viscosity.